stupid vendor tricks

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Delivered-To: dfarber+ () ux13 sp cs cmu edu
Date: Mon, 10 May 2004 23:34:34 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Dr. James J. O'Donnell" <provost () georgetown edu>
Subject: stupid vendor tricks
X-X-Sender: provost@gusun
To: dave () farber net


Dave, a new one on me.  Just bought a new Toshiba Portege R-100 -- perfect
laptop for my needs (it's the 12 inch screen superlightweight that Sony
invented in the early Vaio days and now doesn't bother to make any more).
So within an hour of getting my dialup configured, it started crashing --
announcing it would need to reboot in 60 seconds.  This was both maddening
and familiar -- and sure enough it was familiar.  It was the Blaster worm,
which we all got to know last summer.  Got the FixBlaster tool from
Symantec, disinfected, and I was fine.

What's missing?  Well, why is Toshiba selling me a brand new machine in
May that comes with WinXP and IE that hasn't been patched yet for last
summer's worm?  When you call their help line, the recording begins by
telling you that if you have Sasser trouble, you should go to the
Microsoft website, so my guess is that they are getting plenty of folks
with sexy new machines that go sour on them because they can't get them
protected fast enough.  I spent the evening getting 12MB of Windows
Updates to download on dialup, then got my Symantec updated (the version
on my machine was two months old), so I think I'm clean now.  Sure is fun
to get to know your nice new machine this way.

Jim O'Donnell
Georgetown U. 

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